MOTHER LOST A POUND and a half that week, taking care of me. Of course she still had a long way to go, and she hadn’t been doing her exercises at all.
“I give up,” I told Aunt Marsha when she came to visit. I told her about Mrs. Marlene G. and the Venus de Milo Figure Salon. I told her about the Avon lady and the way Mother didn’t care about self-improvement at all.
I was very surprised when Aunt Marsha became angry with me. “Listen,” she said. “I have to tell you something important, Teddy. There are people in this world who care a great deal about the way they look, who don’t really care about anything else, for that matter. And there are people who care mostly about other people, about their feelings, and if they have everything they need. Well, your mother is a people-person. Now there’s nothing wrong with improving yourself. Jean could certainly lose a few pounds. She could do something about her hair too, instead of chopping it off with those kitchen shears every month. I’ll give her a few hints myself, if you want me to. But it’s about time you and Karen learned about the things that really matter. About feelings. About what a kind and generous person your mother is. About her sense of humor and how she smiles and acts cheerful even when she’s feeling awful, so that other people will be cheered up.” Aunt Marsha was talking so fast she was almost out of breath.
I was all recovered from my illness, but now I felt terrible. “But the magazines,” I said. “They’re always saying that you have to keep up—” My voice squeaked. “You have to fight wrinkles and bulges, and match your makeup to your wardrobe ...”
Aunt Marsha took a deep breath. “Ah, Teddy, do you believe everything you read? Sure it feels good to look your best, and it does help a little to make your way in this world. But you can’t take all that so seriously. Some of the greatest women of our times aren’t beautiful. Except inside. Think of Eleanor Roosevelt, think of Golda Meir.”
“But my father—”
“Your father!” she said. “Do you think they split up because your mother doesn’t color-coordinate her makeup? Teddy, what happened between Dan ... between your father and mother is very complicated. I can’t begin to explain it to you, but it has very little to do with diets and hairdos.” She sat down next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. “I know how you feel, honey. When a marriage breaks up, it’s almost as if someone has died. You couldn’t feel worse. But you just have to accept it.”
“But my mother ...” I didn’t think my mother really accepted it either.
“Your mother is all right,” Aunt Marsha said. “She has a job, she has lots of friends. Listen, Teddy, someday your mother might get married again too. But she doesn’t have to—she’s strong and she’s independent.”
I wanted to tell Aunt Marsha about the shoebox full of love letters, but I couldn’t. I had never told anyone about them. Even though I read them over and over again, I always felt ashamed of myself afterward. But if my mother was so independent, how come she didn’t throw them away? Why did she keep that dumb shoebox if she didn’t believe Daddy would come home again too?
Aunt Marsha interrupted my thoughts. “If you want to do your mother a favor, you and Karen ought to try to get her to stop smoking. I’m more concerned about her health than anything else.”
“She keeps saying she’s going to stop and then she doesn’t.”
“Well, maybe you kids could start an all-out campaign. You know—slogans, warnings, signs all over the house.”
Karen thought it was a great idea. She loved to invent things. She was always entering contests where you have to name a new product, and she made her own greeting cards, with a million crayoned flowers and original poems. They weren’t really too good and she never won anything, but that didn’t discourage her at all. Last Mother’s Day she wrote, “Roses are red and violets are blue. Mother, I think the greatest person is you!” Well, at least the sentiment was all right.
She sat at the desk in the bedroom, writing furiously and throwing the pages into the wastebasket. “Oh, awful!” she cried. “No good!” and she’d crumple the papers into a ball. Finally, she came up with a few slogans that pleased her, and she made carefully lettered signs on oaktag, using her good set of Magic Markers. SMOKE IS NO JOKE! she wrote, TO SMOKO IS LOCO! I couldn’t imagine what the ones she had thrown out were like.
We put the signs everywhere, on Mother’s night table, propped on the coffee can in the cupboard, and Karen even soaped one of her slogans onto the bathroom mirror: NUTTS TO BUTTS!
Mother didn’t say a word about the signs. We watched her closely, though, and she didn’t smoke any cigarettes in the house that first day. But she went to visit a friend in the building after supper, and of course we didn’t know what she did at the bank during the day.
When Ezra came over on Monday night, he suggested a sign about “oral fixation,” which has to do with what psychologists believe about smoking, but Karen didn’t like it because it didn’t rhyme.
After the spaghetti and meatballs, Ezra started asking us some questions. “What would you do,” he wanted to know, “if you found a letter, stamped and addressed, lying in the street?”
“Mail it,” I said promptly, and Ezra looked pleased.
“Not me,” Karen said. “What if it was something very terrible, like a ‘Dear John’ letter, where a lady is breaking her engagement to some soldier who’s fighting a war?”
“So what?” I said.
“So what if he gets killed after reading the letter?”
“That has nothing to do with it. And it’s none of your business anyway.”
“But he could have died happy!” Karen said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“Yeah, well, what if it was a threatening letter with dirty words?”
“How would you know if you didn’t read it?”
“Right! So you’d be taking a big chance.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I said again.
“Well, it could be,” she insisted.
Mother and Ezra were laughing. Then she yawned and stretched. “Ho-hum,” she said. “I think I’ll go downstairs and take a little walk.”
I rolled my eyes at Ezra and made a face.
He took the hint. “I’ll go with you, Aunt Jean,” he said, jumping up.
“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t bother, Ez. You stay here with the girls and finish the test. I won’t be gone long.”
We all knew she was going outside to have a cigarette. I looked pleadingly at Ezra, but he didn’t say anything else.
Mother put on her cardigan and left.
“In what way are an apple and an orange alike?” Ezra asked.
“Oh!” I said. “Why did you let her go out by herself? You know she’s going to have a cigarette!”
“I know, Teddy. But we can’t be policemen. We can only encourage her.” He pointed to one of Karen’s signs. “She has to do the rest by herself. She has to make up her own mind.”
I realized he was right. It was the same way when I used to bite my nails.
Karen made a new sign for the front door, so that Mother would see it the minute she came back from her walk, SMOKE MAKES YOU CHOKE, the sign said. Karen thought it was one of her best.